Recently there has been growing interest in past and ongoing environmental change. Some of this has been presented in a form that is accessible to the public, and which might help prompt interest in longer-term issues and the need to invest in managing such things. Before the late 1980s, relatively few researchers explored environment–human relationships: possibly this was a reaction to the excesses of environmental determinists before the 1940s, or perhaps it was because physical and social sciences had a strong mutual suspicion and different language. The linkage of environmental events to human fortunes has also been stimulated by severe El Niño/Southern Oscillation (ENSO) events of the 1980s and 1990s (Barrow, 2003).